Gosu Programming Language Announced

As another new programming language is announced, its creators argue just why we need Gosu in our lives.

Gosu has just been announced as a new object oriented,
statically typed programming language for the Java Virtual Machine,
licensed under the Apache License v2.0. Inevitably, the Gosu team
have met with the reaction of ‘why do we need another programming
language?’ and Alan Keefer has now set out to answer this in a
‘Why Gosu?’ post. Firstly, the team created Gosu
because they required a language with a certain set of
characteristics to be used in configuring their applications, and
at the beginning of their journey with Gosu there wasn’t a
programming language that offered all these capabilities. “We ended
up creating it almost accidentally out of necessity,” he writes. As
they continued to work with Gosu, the team at Guidewire began to
think there might be a space in the programming language market for
it, which he describes as a “language that’s statically typed,
dynamically compilable, with some metaprogramming capabilities,
syntactic sugar in the most needed places, and with language
features like closures, type inference, and enhancements that
address some of the most glaring deficiencies and pain points in
Java.” They targeted Java, because Java is a commonly-learnt
language in schools and is generally the “lowest common denominator
language for a lot of people.”

“We think that Gosu fills a vacuum for a statically-typed JVM
language that has a familiar syntax, doesn’t add too much
complexity to Java, and which improves on Java in the most critical
ways,” is his conclusion. Gosu can be downloaded now.